Africans' spirituality inspires missionaries

Countless dots of light wallpapered the night sky over the Tanzanian farming village of Sikonge.

The missionaries clumsily inched along unlit paths, their flashlight beams zig-zagging in the dark as they fumbled toward the Moravian Church's bible college.

More than 100 students from the village already had slipped effortlessly through the moonless dark into a small room. Light glowed from two strips of ceiling lights.

There were no lights six years earlier when retired doctors Bill and Peg Hoffman first came to Sikonge. Electricity was slowly making its way across the country. It went first to the wealthy shopkeepers in the Muslim section of the village. The power poles stopped short of most homes, the bible college, a leprosy camp and a secondary school.

The Hoffmans campaigned at their church in Bethlehem, cradle of the Moravian church in the United States. They raised about $6,000 and brought electricity to the schools, one of a number of good works by Bethlehem Moravians. For the six newest missionaries in the summer of 2006, it brought a sense of hope that they, like the Hoffmans, could better the lives of their brothers and sisters in Tanzania.

''Hallelujah today in the house of the Lord,'' the bible college students sang in English, clapping and whooping as these new arrivals from Bethlehem, friends of the Hoffmans, filed in for the evening fellowship service.

They were successful and, today, of the world's nearly 800,000 Moravians, more than 90 percent live in the developing world. For every Moravian living in the Lehigh Valley there are 57 in Tanzania, the fastest-growing segment of the church.

In his sermon, Dr. Hoffman posed this question: How do churches in the largely white, developed countries of the northern hemisphere help those in poorer parts of the world? His answer: send a new wave of missionaries.

''We need to get out of our pews and live this history,'' he said. ''It's our turn.''

The sermon inspired the Rev. Gordon Mowrer and his wife, Mary. A few months later, they volunteered to join the Hoffmans on their next mission.

The two men had met more than 20 years earlier at St. Luke's Hospital, where Dr. Hoffman was a surgeon and Rev. Mowrer is a chaplain. At the time, Dr. Hoffman was a Presbyterian and had never heard of the Moravian Church. One morning in the hospital cafeteria, Rev. Mowrer gave Dr. Hoffman his first lesson on Moravians.

Then the Hoffmans went to the famous candlelight service on Christmas Eve at Central Moravian Church. A classical music aficionado, Dr. Hoffman was enraptured by the stunning soloists, the small chamber orchestra and choir. The Hoffmans added their names to the church roster the following year.

More than two decades later in June 2006, Rev. Mowrer and Dr. Hoffman joined for a journey that church leaders in the United States hoped would spark a missionary renaissance.

This time there would be a new approach. Unlike traditional missionaries who spend years at a time living and working in foreign countries, new missionaries are asked to take short trips to developing nations to lend their expertise in solving myriad problems.

When they come home, many take up a new role, championing causes of the countries they've visited, working to raise money and awareness in the United States. With this new approach, church leaders believe, missionaries can have the greatest impact.

The Hoffmans embody the new approach. In Bethlehem, they live in a four-story Georgian-era mansion with 18 rooms and leafy green vines creeping up the side. Their home sits among other historic buildings around the corner from Central Moravian Church.

But twice a year they return to Sikonge to live for six weeks in a one-room guest house built for Danish Moravian missionaries. It's furnished with a table, bookshelves, a desk and twin beds pushed against a wall, toe-to-toe.

There they eat, sleep, write grant proposals and wrestle with overspent budgets that provide drugs for AIDS patients and money for clothing and food for orphans, all programs they created. The Hoffmans live without indoor plumbing or running water. They cook meals of beans and rice over a small portable electric stove.

The work is hard. Dr. Peg Hoffman finds refuge in the nighttime cacophony of Sikonge, the chirping crickets and the chorus of howling, yapping dogs that puts on a 30-minute show -- and then stops, she said with a snap of her fingers.

''I always sleep well in Sikonge,'' said Mama Peg, as she's known in the village.

Dreams of rebirth

The new Sikonge Moravian Church, built with money from the Bethlehem church, is testament to changes in the village during the last 17 years. With a red-and-silver-striped tin roof, the octagon church is modern and spacious compared to others in outlying villages.

It was finished in 2003, more than a decade after Central Moravian Church opened its arms to a Tanzanian man who left Sikonge to study at the Moravian Theological Seminary in Bethlehem. The congregation showered the Rev. Eliya Kategile and his family with gifts and affection. He suggested a partnership between the two churches. Leaders forged the alliance in 1990.

Rev. Kategile returned to Tanzania and died about the same time the new church was finished. He was 61. His Sikonge grave is a white-tiled shrine that gleams against the weeds overrunning the graveyard; his legacy is everywhere.

Since the partnership was forged, Bethlehem Moravians have contributed electricity, several churches, water wells, a girls' dormitory, drugs, sutures and other medical supplies. Their efforts have built on more than a century of missionary work in western Tanzania by the Danish Moravian Church, which founded the Sikonge District Hospital in 1936.

But despite these contributions, women still walk a mile to the water pump each day and cook over open fire pits. The majority of villagers are subsistence farmers, growing corn, ground nuts and other crops.

Faced with this reality, Rev. Mowrer still saw hope. All around him was the new face of the Moravian Church worldwide: people struggling with poverty but, as Rev. Mowrer would learn on a Sunday at the Sikonge Moravian Church, an intensely spiritual group.

The Sunday service lasted for more than three hours, interminable for the Bethlehem missionaries accustomed to hourlong services. But when the choirs sang, no one sat still.

The all-women, a capella Mama Choir filled the space with rich harmony. The Gospel Choir was wildly popular, its members singing with one foot in front of the next in a carefully choreographed routine. The rhythm and the twang of electric guitars over scratchy speakers soon started the congregation's feet tapping and shoulders swaying.

Then a small boy took the microphone and, singing passionately, bobbed to the beat, spinning, almost gliding across the front of the church. Women rushed up the aisle, placing coins in the pocket of his button-up shirt.

The spirituality and joy of his fellow Moravians humbled Rev. Mowrer. That night, in his bed at Mount Kilimanjaro Lodge, he dreamed of his own death, a dream of revelation and transformation.

The Moravian church he embodied, white and wealthy, had given way to another, a church whose members live in mud and stick hovels.

''I think there is a part of me that is dying,'' Rev. Mowrer said, reflecting on his dream the next morning. ''To realize that so much of the world lives this way and I don't ...This is too frightening for me.''

He now saw, more clearly than ever, why his church was growing in Africa and shrinking in the United States. Religion's relevance had been dulled in the United States by material abundance.

''That's all they have to do,'' said the reverend. ''Everyone is just trying to give a little bit of hope.''

The point was driven home the next day. Rev. Mowrer learned hope is especially precious in Tanzania where famine, plague, poverty and despair are everyday realities, not biblical stories of people long dead.

The bible came to life for Rev. Mowrer at the village leprosy camp in Kidugalo, Swahili for ''end of the road.''

Today, leprosy is a dying disease. With increased access to multidrug therapy, only Tanzania and a handful of other countries are still working to eliminate the disease. They have made vast strides.

At one time more than 800 lepers lived at the Kidugalo camp. Now about a dozen remain. Their bodies bear the markings of the disease: disfigured faces, missing digits, stumps where hands and feet once were. Ostracized long ago, they built their lives around the camp, forging friendships and lifelong partnerships. A few even married there.

Looking at the group, Rev. Mowrer was reminded of biblical passages that told of lepers, shunned by society, forced to warn passers-by to keep away by shouting ''unclean, unclean!'' He and the other missionaries lined up, making a point to shake hands with each person in the camp.

After the greeting, an old blind man hobbled over to sit on one of the benches. Suddenly inspired, the man stood up to sing. He danced with all the vigor of a young man, lifting and shaking the stick he leaned on for support just minutes earlier.

''Try dancing with your eyes closed,'' he told the others later that night. About a week and a half earlier, Forrest had told the group he blamed his mother for wasting his summer vacation in Africa. Looking at the hole in the ground that would serve as their toilet in Sikonge, he told her, ''I couldn't possibly hate you more.''

Yet at the leprosy camp, Rev. Mowrer saw something new in his grandson, a flicker of revelation.

Forrest and the other missionaries were witnessing the end of a disease that had plagued humanity for millennia.

When the last of the aging leprosy patients at the camp die, it will be shuttered forever. But another disease has risen to take its place. About 1.4 million people in Tanzania can expect to die from complications of AIDS.

By journey's end, the missionaries would realize something the Hoffmans had discovered years earlier: AIDS was now killing this hauntingly beautiful country.